U.S. policymakers seem to have given up on Japan, laments Michael Green, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The exasperation is premature, Green says, for by most yardsticks, Japan is more important to U.S. interests than is China. This is important as U.S. Republicans choose a presidential candidate and think more intensely about foreign policy.
"Who can take a country seriously when its June 25 elections featured almost no debate on how to revitalize a stagnant economy?" Green asks rhetorically in a paper released last week by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Who, he continues, can take Japan seriously "when the electorate returned to power one of the most unpopular coalition governments and prime ministers in postwar Japanese history? When the bureaucracy stubbornly refuses to reduce the access fees that NTT charges for Internet service, even though information technology is the only hope for Japan to achieve higher productivity to compensate for a rapidly aging society?